Behind the Beautiful Forevers is the most disturbing book I have read in a long time.
Although it reads like a well-written novel, it is the non-fictional account of the lives of several families living in the Annawadi slum at the edge of the Mumbai airport. The slum is located behind a sign that advertises tile flooring with the motto: Beautiful Forever. That's where the title comes from.
The author, Katherine Boo, is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist. She spent three years in Annawadi where she developed relationships with several families and followed their stories. She did extensive interviews and other research for the book which is subtitled "Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity."
Residents of Annawadi are mostly refugees from rural areas who were unable to sustain themselves there and were drawn to the bustling, emergent economy of Mumbai. They literally live on the cast-aways of the more affluent as they pick through garbage daily looking for re-cyclables they can sell. Annawadi itself is likely to be recycled into middle class housing and other projects deemed more appropriate for the area around the international airport by city officials.
The families Boo follows include the good, the corrupt, the selfish, the intelligent, the greedy, the disabled, the beautiful, and the despised. Although the caste system of India is breaking down as it evolves into a modern state, the barriers are still there. Corruption infects every aspect of their lives in ways that those of us blessed to live in America cannot begin to imagine.
In her concluding chapter, Boo writes "Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional...It is easy from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good. The astonishment is that some people are good and that many people try to be...."
This is the message that is so disturbing that at one point in the narrative I set the book aside for a few days. Without providing a spoiler, I will only say that when I returned to finish the book I was relieved to find that my worst fears about the outcome of a tragic situation for one of the families was not realized and a small bit of hope revealed.
Beyond the Beautiful Forevers reveals the hidden and marginalized society living beneath the glittering facade of the new Mumbai. By implication, similar "under-cities" exist wherever the global economy is emerging and changing traditional cultures.
Boo concludes, "If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything straight?" This is not a hopeful message, but it is an enlightening and important one.
"Behind the Beautiful Forevers" follows the life of a few Annawadi slumdwellers. Abdul diligently sorts through the trash, looking for metals, hoping to make enough profit that his family can move out of the slums. He did not plan, however, to spend money paying lawyers and paying bribes to numerous public officials so that members of his family, including himself, did not end up in jail for the next ten years to defend against accusations of his one-legged, suicidal neighbor. Asha, the most politically-connected woman in the slums, makes ends meet by profiting off the unfortunate circumstances of her fellow slumdwellers and siphoning off money from projects meant to educate children. She and her daughter, the only college graduate in the slum, often disagree on the proper means to gain power and the importance of education, although both are teachers. Boo also brings into the novel other children who earn their living by seeking out "valuable" trash left by tourists and Indians visiting the airport. Through these children's eyes, Boo show the disturbing choice that they must make between becoming thieves or risking extreme malnutrition for themselves and their families. All of these stories take place in a slum where sewage flows next to the makeshift huts and rats and pigs coexist with the slumdwellers. Many see suicide as the only escape.
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